Hewlett-Packard Co has swung back on the offensive in the US with a predatory enhanced workstation trade-in programme, which it says accepts the broadest range of workstations, personal computers and X terminals in part exchange for new Precision Architecture RISC workstations and X stations. The new TradeUp ’93 programme will run for the full year and accepts units from Sun Microsystems Inc, Digital Equipment Corp, IBM Corp, Silicon Graphics Inc, Apple Computer Inc and 80386 and 80486-based personal computers for up to 30% off the price of eligible Hewlett-Packard systems. It also offers users the option to trade up to HP 700/RX stations or to add X terminals to their networks, and is claimed to be the only industry programme to do so. It also applies discounts to the cost of expanded memory, mass-storage devices and layered Hewlett-Packard software. It also applies to Hewlett-Packard’s own old non-RISC and Apollo systems and does not require that customers trade in a minimum number of systems; it also offers software-licence transfer programme so users can functionally duplicate their present software environment.
